The brothers, who also hold Swedish citizenship, have had a terrible start to the week.

On Monday, the EU said they would have to repay all the subsidies they received to build up their business in the poor northern Romanian county of Bihor, on the Hungarian border. Their factories, which produce brands such as Servus beer and Rony biscuits, depended on what Brussels ruled was illegal state aid. According to their lawyers, the pair had decided to invest in a region as impoverished as Bihor on the understanding that Romania would subsidise them. On that pledge hang some 9,000 jobs.

Their business model, which predated Romania’s accession to the EU, came unstuck when Bucharest decided to join the European club. Competition authorities no longer allowed this kind of state largesse. In 2005, Bucharest cut the funds to the brothers in Bihor. (Romania finally joined in 2007).

This is where things get interesting legally, and the trade aficionados will start to realise something is afoot.

There has been lots of analysis on a new list of economic reforms that the Greek government sent to its bailout monitors over the weekend, including this incredibly comprehensive report from the Athens-based analytical website Macropolis.

But before everyone goes concluding that this is the final list that eurozone creditors will rule on, remember: nothing has been submitted yet to the eurogroup – the committee of 19 eurozone finance ministers that will ultimately rule on whether the reforms are sufficient to unlock the remaining €7.2bn in bailout funds Athens desperately needs.

And tonight’s “deadline” for bailout monitors to approve a submission, and then forward it onto the eurogroup, is nothing more than a self-imposed one; in reality, there is no deadline other than the date when Athens eventually runs out of cash.

People on both sides of the negotiations say that despite three days of talks, the list is not comprehensive as yet. “There was no such thing as an original list,” insists an official from one of the bailout monitoring institutions. “There were contributions, tables, pieces of paper.”

Indeed, on the Greek side, some involved in the discussions say a fuller, longer, and more detailed document is in the works. They argue the issue is not, as many among the bailout monitors claim, a lack of detail. The issue is getting all the details – some 72 reforms, according to one person in the Athens camp – into a well-organised document, in English, without mistakes in substance or politics. Read more

Tsipras, at right without tie, and Merkel, left in red, at Thursday's Greece discussion in Brussels

If you didn’t know what the standoff over Greece’s bailout was all about, Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek prime minister, has provided an excellent primer in a letter sent a week ago to his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he is scheduled to meet Monday night in Berlin.

Our story about the March 15 letter, which the FT obtained a copy of, can be found here. But as is our normal practice, we thought we’d provide readers of the Brussels Blog a bit more detail – including a copy of the letter, which we’ve posted here.

It’s worth noting that eurozone officials say a similar letter was sent to a select group of other leaders, including François Hollande, the French president; Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank chief; and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission.

For those who are having a hard time following every twist an turn in Tsipras’ dispute with his bailout lenders, the letter is filled with a lot of jargon and references to multiple previous exchanges of letters, which can be confusing even to a Greek crisis veteran. For that reason, below is an annotated version of the Tsipras letter, which is our modest attempt to explain its intricacies to the uninitiated.

The letter starts off by referring to a February 20 agreement by the eurogroup – the committee of all 19 eurozone finance ministers which is responsible for overseeing the EU’s portion of Greece’s €172bn bailout. That was the meeting where ministers ultimately agreed to extend the Greek bailout into June; it was originally to run out at the end of February, and the prospect of Greece going without an EU safety net had spurred massive withdrawals from Greek bank deposits, which many feared was the start of a bank run. Read more

Protesters outside the Greek finance ministry in Athens during a visit by the troika in 2013

Among the issues plaguing deliberations over the way forward on Greece’s bailout is how the country’s international creditors can verify its economic and fiscal situation without sending monitors to Athens– which would look very much like the return of the hated “troika”.

Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek prime minister, has declared the death of the troika – which is made up of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund – but for now, the troika isn’t really dead. The re-branded “institutions” must still evaluate Greece’s reform programme and give it a signoff before any of the remaining €7.2bn in bailout can be disbursed.

But the new Greek government has resisted anyone from the “institutions” showing up in Athens; they were originally supposed to show up this week, but officials said Greek authorities blocked the visit. In a letter Thursday to Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and eurogroup president, Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, suggested an alternative to a return of “the institutions” to Athens: have them meet in Brussels instead. Wrote Varoufakis:

As for the location of the technical meetings and fact finding and fact-exchange sessions, the Greek government’s view is that they ought to take place in Brussels.

But Dijsselbloem’s response to Varoufakis on Friday, in a letter obtained by the Brussels Blog, suggests officials from the “institutions” may be showing up in Athens after all. Wrote Dijsselbloem: Read more

Dijsselbloem, left, speaks with Varoufakis during a finance ministers' meeting in February

During a 45-minute interview in his Dutch finance ministry office in The Hague, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chairman of the eurogroup, offered up a detailed recounting of his month-long negotiations with Athens to secure last week’s agreement extending Greece’s €172bn bailout by four months – as well as his views of what might come next.

Portions of that interview have been be published on the Financial Times website here and here, but as is our normal practice at the Brussels Blog, we thought we’d offer up a more complete transcript of the interview since some of it – including previously undisclosed details about the three eurogroup meetings needed to reach a deal – was left on the cutting room floor and may be of interest to those following the Greek crisis closely. The transcript has been edited very slightly to eliminate cross-talk and shorten occasionally long-winded questions from the interviewer.

The interview started on Dijsselbloem’s decision to travel to Athens to meet Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras just days after the January 25 elections – a visit that was overshadowed by a tension-filled press conference between Dijsselbloem and his Greek counterpart, Yanis Varoufakis, which spurred a market sell-off: Read more

[UPDATE] In response to our post below, the Greek government this morning has denied it ever agreed to the text we got our hands on. “At no point in time did the Greek delegation give consent to the text that has been published,” said Nikos Pappas, the prime minister’s chief of staff. Our account is based on several sources from multiple delegations, so we stand by our story. However, Greek officials insist the text they agreed to Wednesday night was actually an earlier version than the final statement we published. These officials say the agreed draft was changed before it was to be issued at a late-night press conference by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the eurogroup chairman, prompting their veto. The drama continues…

Wednesday night’s breakdown in talks between Greece and the other 18 eurozone finance ministers happened at such the last minute that many of the participants in the eurogroup meeting – including Wolfgang Schäuble, the powerful German finance minster – didn’t even know it had happened, since they had already left the building.

According to several officials involved in the talks, Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, had agreed to a joint statement with his colleagues, a statement that was even signed off by Greece’s deputy prime minister, Yannis Dragasakis, who was also in Brussels for the gathering.

Once agreed, the eurogroup meeting broke up and Schäuble and several of his colleagues headed out the door. But officials said Varoufakis put in one last call back to Athens to inform them what he had just agreed to – and government officials vetoed the statement.

We at Brussels Blog got our hands on the statement and have posted it below. In many senses, it has a little bit for everyone. For eurozone officials, who were pushing Athens hard to request an extension of the current €172bn bailout, which expires at the end of the month, it leaves open the option to “explore the possibilities of extending” the programme.

For Varoufakis, there’s even the word “bridge” mentioned in the final paragraph – though not in the sense the Greek minister probably wanted, which is as part of a bridge financing deal. Read more

One of the unmentioned problems looming over the current Greece standoff is the fact that Athens will need a third bailout, regardless of what happens in a week’s worth of Brussels meetings that start on Wednesday. Eurozone officials say that both Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister, and his boss, Alexis Tsipras, have acknowledged that in private meetings.

Eurozone officials are understandably reluctant to estimate the size of another Greek bailout – and not just for political reasons. Trying to guess how much Athens will need without digging through Greece’s books is a fraught affair, especially since tax revenues have reportedly begun to dry up and it’s been months since the troika did their last full-scale analysis.

But that shouldn’t prevent Brussels Blog from doing some spit-balling. According to a very quick-and-dirty back-of-the envelope estimate, a third Greek bailout could run as much as €37.8bn if Varoufakis’ plans are adopted in full. Are Greece’s 18 eurozone partners prepared to cough up that kind of money in the current environment? Read more

A pipeline at a recently-modernised gas compressor station in eastern Ukraine

In only three weeks, the Juncker commission will unveil one of its most totemic policy packages: the so-called “energy union”.

But behind the hype, key parts of the plan still seem to lack any real bite, according to documents seen by the Brussels Blog.

Overall, a single energy market makes a lot of sense as the EU is currently often a messy patchwork of 28 counter-productive energy islands. If the member states integrated their gas and electricity networks more deeply, the continent could cut costs, slash emissions and reduce dependency on Russia. Who could object to that? Well, as ever, the mood among member states is hardly harmonious.

Relatively speaking, hardware is the easy bit. Build gas pipelines and electrical cables across borders and that will improve security of supply and help prices converge.

The big hurdle is the software. Fundamentally, energy has massively different costs in various countries because of divergent tax and regulatory systems. You cannot have a free-flowing single market until you harmonise these. Poles, Czechs and Hungarians pay less than half of German and Danish rates for power. In Denmark, 57 per cent of the final electricity price is based on levies, whereas in Britain the figure is closer to 5 per cent.

So will the member states converge fully? They don’t seem to want to. Sefcovic admitted on Wednesday that taxation was a significant problem and that he had hit a wall with member states: “Most of us in this room would agree that it would be the best way forward but we have to be very realistic that unanimity on an issue like energy taxation would be very difficult to achieve.” Oh dear. That’s a pretty big hole in the energy union plan. Read more

Jean-Claude Juncker, the new European Commission president, was being pummeled by the European Parliament after a leak revealed widespread tax avoidance in Luxembourg while he was prime minister of the Grand Duchy.

In a bid to quell the criticism, Mr Juncker said that a lack of tax harmonization within the EU was to blame. To combat this, the commission president said he would introduce legislation to force the automatic exchange of tax-rulings that affect companies based in other member states.

But, according to this leaked document from 2012, both the commission and member states have long been aware of the problem of cross-border tax-rulings – and had already looked into ensuring the automatic exchange of tax information.

The Code of Conduct Group, which looks at business taxation with the commission, came out with guidance in 2012 to encourage member states to “spontaneously exchange the relevant information” on cross border tax rulings. They then asked member states how feasible this was. Read more

The new year has brought with it much talk of new diplomatic “windows” opening for talks between Europe and the Kremlin, thanks in large part to the sudden economic chaos Russia faces due to the plummeting price of oil and value of the rouble.

Indeed, according to EU officials recent hopes of Russian acquiescence ahead of a proposed summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana have largely been dashed during diplomatic discussions with Germany and France because of refusals by the Kremlin to budge.

Still, the issue will gradually rise up the agenda in Brussels as the sanctions agreed last year begin to expire – the first in March, but incrementally towards the big economic measures which run out in June and July. It will take a unanimous decision of all 28 EU countries to renew the sanctions.

Despite the lack of progress with Russia, Mogherini this week circulated an “issues paper on relations with Russia” ahead of Monday’s meeting of foreign ministers that proposes a series of re-engagements with Moscow. Our friends and rivals at the Wall Street Journal were the first to report about it, but we’ve posted a copy of the paper here. Read more

It is his successor, Cecilia Malmström, who will have to take the results of this public consultation squarely on the chin on Tuesday. It’s going to be a big (and possibly bruising) day for EU trade policy.

This is technically known as Investor State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS, and has caused a huge international stink. It is probably the single biggest political obstacle to the EU-US deal, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which is potentially the world’s biggest trade deal. Reservations about ISDS are particularly strong in Germany and Austria.

So what will this consultation show on Tuesday? As far as we know, more than 150,000 people have written in. The vast majority are unhappy. To give a scale of the feverish interest in this topic, the trade commission has never held a public consultation that garnered more than 1,000 responses before. Read more

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives 0.4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.Read more

The dance had become so routine that we at the Brussels Blog were thinking of giving it a name, the Eurozone Two-Step.

Ever since the eurozone crisis first rocked international markets nearly five years ago, European Central Bank chiefs – first Jean-Claude Trichet, then Mario Draghi – sent a very clear message to the currency union’s political leaders: we can only act if you act first.

But with the markets watching Frankfurt closely for signs Draghi is about to launch another bold move – US-style quantitative easing, purchasing sovereign bonds to halt fears the bloc is headed into a deflationary spiral – there are new indications one of the partners is no longer dancing.

Back in October at a eurozone summit, Draghi was able to get a little-noticed statement out of the assembled leaders committing them to another “Four Presidents Report”, a reference to the blueprint delivered in 2012 that set a path towards further centralisation of eurozone economic policy. The report helped kick-start the EU’s just-completed “banking union.”

Progress on that 2012 blueprint has since stalled, however, and at his last summit press conference, then-European Council president Herman Van Rompuy said the new “Four Presidents Report” would be delivered at the December EU summit, which starts next Thursday. Many in Brussels saw this as the quid for Draghi’s quo – once the leaders agreed to another blueprint for eurozone integration, Draghi would have a free hand to launch QE.

But according to a leaked draft of the communiqué for next week’s summit, Draghi may have to deliver his quo without a eurozone quid. The text (which we’ve posted here) makes clear that leaders have no intention of delivering a new blueprint any time soon. Read more

Juncker presents his €315bn investment plan to the European Parliament in Strasbourg

On the eve of two of the most momentous events of his young tenure as European Commission president – Thursday’s failed vote of no confidence against him in the European Parliament and Friday’s long-awaited decision on whether to sanction France or Italy for failing to comply with EU budget rules – Jean-Claude Juncker sat down for his first interview since assuming office with a small group of European newspapers in Strasbourg.

In addition to his just-unveiled €315bn plan to revive investment in the EU’s stagnating economy, the primary topics of the 70-minute interview were the ongoing controversy surrounding revelations that foreign companies were able to avoid large tax bills thanks to Luxembourg tax rulings, and how he intends to deal with the budgets from Rome and Paris. In addition to our story on the interview, we are publishing annotated excerpts online here.

The interview started with Juncker’s new investment plan and whether he had hoped there would be more public money in the programme. Under his proposal, the EU will contribute €21bn in guarantees, and all of the €315bn of investment would be private money, either raised by the European Investment Bank through issuing bonds or by finding private financiers to co-invest in new EU infrastructure projects:

I hadn’t a figure in mind as far as public money is concerned. I said in July this will be a combination of public money and private investment. We don’t have the money we need. We can’t spend money we don’t have. We took the money that was available, not without difficulty and without huge pedagogic efforts as far as the different commissioners involved in this financing structure.

Juncker speaks to the press at last week's Group of 20 meeting in Brisbane

Just how does Jean-Claude Juncker plan on getting to €300bn?

With the formal unveiling of his highly-anticipated plan to stimulate growth in the EU just days away – officials say the Commission will decide on it early next week – politicians both in Brussels and in national capitals are abuzz about whether the financial engineering involved will make the €300bn credible.

Emmanuel Macron, the influential French economy minister, has already expressed concern, and in a meeting with a small group of reporters ahead of today’s announcement of his own stimulus plan, Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt, head of the European Parliament’s centrist Liberals, said he worried the programme would just move around existing funding.

As we reported earlier this week, the plan will take existing cash from the EU budget and the European Investment Bank and use it as seed money for new investment funds in order to attract private capital. The public money would act as a “first loss” tranche, taking the first hit if the investment goes bad, and giving private investors more senior status – something officials hope will “crowd in” all that private cash currently sitting on the sidelines.

The two questions that will be closely watched is just how much public money will be used – and how much new private capital the Commission will forecast coming in over the plan’s three-year period.

According to documents obtained by Brussels Blog, the answer to question one – how much public money will be used – will not only include EU budget and EIB money, but also funds committed by national governments. For instance, the €10bn in new public spending announced this month by Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance ministry, appears to be counted in the €300bn plan.

How the limited amount of public funding can be leveraged is far more complex. And by nearly all accounts, the public funding will indeed be limited: the plan is explicitly seeking to avoid any new public debt, and officials acknowledge a significant part of it will involve more efficient use of existing public resources and maximising already-approved instruments. Read more

Britain’s €2.1bn EU budget surcharge is a subject of mystifying, mind-bending complexity. Not even the people who are supposed to understand seem to understand. After days trying to solve the budget puzzle, the Brussels Blog is going to attempt to explain the numbers. Right or wrong, it should at least help to confuse matters further.

First the claims. Last week, George Osborne boldly said he halved the UK bill and achieved a “real win for British taxpayers”. EU officials say the British payments are rescheduled but benefit from no additional discount.

The truth, as we understand it, is even more bewildering:

– Britain is down to make a gross surcharge payment well in excess of €2.1bn, but at a different time than originally demanded.

– Britain will receive most of the money back by the end of 2015, but it doesn’t know precisely when, and it will only be thanks to two automatic rebates.

– Osborne requested a bigger discount and was denied, but he may get an EU Christmas present nonetheless.

At a time when Mario Draghi’s style of running the European Central Bank is under question – there’s reportedly been grumbling he’s setting monetary policy in off-the-cuff public remarks rather than in consultation with the bank’s board members – it is easy to forget that Draghi’s most famous act as ECB chief was also an unscripted public utterance: “whatever it takes”.

The now-famous 2012 remark, which is widely credited with ending the hair-on-fire phase of the eurozone crisis by hinting the ECB would use its printing presses to buy up sovereign debt of besieged governments, has long been viewed as a masterstroke of market management, since the ECB has yet to spend a cent on such bond purchases.

But as the FT and other news organisations have reported, many on the ECB governing council were taken aback by the remarks because the issue wasn’t discussed more widely before Draghi declared it as ECB policy.

The Brussels Blog recently got its hands on yet more evidence that Draghi’s remarks – made at a conference in London in July 2012 – were inserted at the last minute without wider consultation: raw transcripts of discussions with Timothy Geithner, who was US treasury secretary at the time, about the eurozone crisis.

The 100 pages of transcripts we obtained are of interviews Geithner gave to assistants preparing his book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, which was published in May. Many of the recollections also appear in the book, but Geithner provides more detail and more bluntness – including a fondness for the f-word – in the pages we obtained.

This is particularly the case for the “whatever it takes” speech. In his book, Geithner mentions the remark was impromptu. But in the transcript, Geithner reveals his source for that passage: Draghi himself, who told Geithner he had decided to insert the words into his address after meeting with London financiers who were convinced the eurozone was on the brink of implosion. Here’s the section of the transcript relating to Draghi’s speech: Read more

As we reported in today’s dead-tree edition of the Financial Times, Italy, the holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, will table a compromise plan at the meeting which would allow Britain – and the Netherlands, which has the second-highest bill, with €643m due at the end of the month – to pay the new EU tab in instalments.

This is unlikely to be enough for the UK, which is seeking both a delay in the due date and a reduction in the bill, but there are growing signs that its allies in the fight, including the Dutch, are inclined to support the plan.

Ahead of the meeting, Brussels Blog obtained a copy of the two-paragraph Italian proposal, and we’ve posted it here. The measure asks the European Commission to come back with an amendment to existing EU rules for paying such bills that would in “exceptional circumstances” allow countries to pay their surcharge in tranches instead of all at once on the December 1 due date. Here’s the key section: Read more

Renzi arrives at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and quickly took issue with Barroso

If you read the EU’s budget rules, it appears to be a cut and dried affair: if the European Commission has concerns that a eurozone country’s budget is in “particularly serious non-compliance” with deficit or debt limits, it has to inform the government of its concerns within one week of the budget’s submission. Such contact is the first step towards sending the budget back entirely for revision.

As the FT was the first to report this week, the Commission decided to notify five countries – Italy, France, Austria, Slovenia and Malta – that their budgets may be problematic on Wednesday. Helpfully, the Italian government posted the “strictly confidential” letter it received from the Commission’s economic chief, Jyrki Katainen, on its website today.

But at day one of the EU summit in Brussels, the letter – and Italy’s decision to post it – suddenly became the subject of a very public tit-for-tat between José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing Commission president, and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minster.

Barroso fired the first shot at a pre-summit news conference, expressing surprise and annoyance that Renzi’s government had decided to make the letter public. For good measure, he took a pop at the Italian press, which in recent days has been reporting that Barroso was the one pushing for a hard line against Rome, and implying he was motivated by his desire to score political points back home in Portugal, where he has long been rumoured as a potential presidential candidate after leaving the Commission:

The first thing I will say is this: If you look at the Italian press, if you look at most of what is reported about what I’ve said or what the Commission has said, most of this news is absolutely false, surreal, having nothing to do with reality. And if they coincide with reality, I think it’s by chance.

Juncker addresses the European Parliament before the vote approving his new Commission

It started out as an internecine turf war within the incoming regime of Jean-Claude Juncker. But it is quickly metastasising into what could be one of the first international policy fights of the Juncker Commission.

The dispute centres on a previously obscure trade arbitration system that allows companies that believe they can’t get a fair hearing in front of national courts to appeal to an international dispute resolution panel known as ISDS, for investor-state dispute settlement.

The systems have become relatively commonplace in international investment treaties, but they suddenly – and to the surprise of many advocates – have become the single biggest bone of contention among opponents of the world’s biggest trade deal, the pact currently being negotiated between the US and EU.

The authors

Peter Spiegel is the FT's Brussels bureau chief. He returned to the FT in August 2010 after spending five years covering foreign policy and national security issues from Washington for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He first joined the FT in 1999 covering business regulation and corporate crime in its Washington bureau, before spending four years covering military affairs and the defence industry in London and Washington.

Alex Barker is EU correspondent, covering the single market, financial regulation and competition. He was formerly an FT political correspondent in the UK and joined the FT in 2005.

Duncan Robinson is the FT's Brussels correspondent, covering internet and telecommunications regulation, justice, employment and migration as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He joined the FT from the New Statesman in 2011